Feifei Wei, Biometrics Section Publications Officer

The Biometrics Section held its annual business committee meeting at JSM 2013 in Montréal, Canada. Complete minutes of the meeting will be available on the section website.

Section Chair Jianwen Cai called the meeting to order, welcomed members and guests, and introduced members of the executive committee. She thanked the 2013 ENAR program chair, Doug Schaubel; 2013 JSM program chair, Wei Sun; and 2013 Continuing Education chair, Donglin Zeng, for their outstanding service.

JSM 2014 Program Chair Jonathan Schildcrout potential applicants were contacted for invited sessions in the areas of machine learning, Big Data, outcome dependent follow-up, and semi-competing risk model. Applications in other areas are welcome.

ENAR 2014 representative, Jason Roy, gave update on ENAR 2014. The program committee received 74 applications for invited sessions. Of these, 40 were selected.

Treasurer Yu Shen thanked the current and past Continuing Education (CE) chairs. CE courses provide extra income for the Biometrics Section; the financial status of the section is sound.

Within ASA executive leadership, there has been a higher representation among those in academia and industry, with smaller representation from government. A broad sector representation throughout all of ASA should be considered. New this year: speed talks/electronic posters. With the increasing number of sections, exploring more of these types of presentations and less invited talks is needed.

Strategic Initiatives chair, Roslyn Stone, suggested having a special call for proposals for Strategic Initiatives in September 2013, to be due in October 2013, based on the current budget surplus. The award will be made before the end of the year. The section can sponsor up to three awards, with the maximum budget of $3,000–$5,000 for 1.5–2 years each. Suggestions have been made to advertise more aggressively for Strategic Initiatives awards, for example posting in the monthly newsletter and cross-listing with the sections related to teaching and education.

Section Past-Chair Dianne Finkelstein reported that the Byar Award committee was pleased with the response and exceptional quality of applications. The Committee consisted of Dianne Finkelstein (committee chair, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University), Jianwen Cai (The University of North Carolina), Mike Daniels (The University of Texas at Austin), Timothy Johnson (University of Michigan), Guosheng Yin (University of Hong Kong), and David Schoenfeld (Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University). Through a comprehensive review process, the committee chose five travel award winners in addition to the Byar Award winner, Kyu Ha Lee of the Harvard School of Public Health for “Bayesian Semiparametric Analysis of Semicompeting Risks Data: Estimating Readmission Rates Among Pancreatic Cancer Patients.”

Travel Award Winners

• Noorie Hyun, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Threshold-Dependent Proportional Hazards Model for Current Status Data with Biomarker Subject to Measurement Error”
• Denis Agniel, Harvard School of Public Health, “Identifying Multiple Regulation in Semiparametric Regression Models”
• Xinyi Lin, Harvard School of Public Health, “Tests for Interactions Between a Genetic Marker Set and Environment on Generalized Linear Models”
• Jesse Yenchih Hsu, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, “Calibrating Sensitivity Analysis to Observed Covariates in Observational Studies”
• Arend Voorman, University of Washington, “Graph Estimation with Joint Additive Models”

Congratulations to the award winners on their notable accomplishments! The Byar award winner received $1,500, and travel award winners each received $800. They presented their research at JSM topic-contributed session 593 on August 7.

Section Awards

Do you know a young investigator who is planning to submit an abstract for the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings? If so, you may wish to alert that individual that the ASA Biometrics Section is seeking applications for the 2014 David P. Byar Young Investigator Award. This annual award is given to a young investigator for best emerging work to be presented at JSM. The award commemorates the late David Byar, a biostatistician who made significant contributions to the development and application of statistical methods and was esteemed as an exceptional mentor during his career at the National Cancer Institute. The winner will receive a $2,000 award.

In addition to the Byar Award, the section may provide travel awards to the authors of other outstanding papers that are submitted to the competition.

Applicants must meet the following criteria:

• Have held a doctorate in statistics, biostatistics, or a related quantitative field for three or fewer years as of April 1 of the current year, or be currently enrolled as a student in a doctoral program in statistics or biostatistics and in active pursuit of a doctoral degree.
• Be a current member of the Biometrics Section (applicant may join at the time of submission for a $5 annual membership fee [$3 for students]). Note that ASA membership does not automatically confer section membership; ASA members must join individual sections in addition to their generic membership.
• Be first author of the paper. The paper may be unsubmitted, submitted, or under review, but may not have already appeared in a journal either online or in print at the time of the application or have been accepted for publication as of December 1.
• Be scheduled to present the same paper submitted for the award at the 2014 Joint Statistical Meetings in Boston, Massachusetts, as either a talk or poster.
• Not have submitted the paper to more than one other ASA section 2014 student/young investigator award competition.

Applicants must submit their JSM abstracts to the Biometrics Section, which will organize a series of topic-contributed sessions to highlight the Byar and travel award winners. Applicants must submit the following materials by December 1.

• A cover letter certifying that the applicant meets the eligibility requirements and is not submitting the paper to any other ASA section student/young investigator award competition
• A current CV
• One copy of the finished paper

All materials must be submitted electronically to 2013 program chair, Jianwen Cai, at cai@email.unc.edu. An electronic submission system is being developed, and the submission web address will be announced on the Biometrics Section’s website.

The 2014 Awards Committee is composed of the 2014 current and past section chairs and chair-elect, as well as three additional individuals to be appointed by the section chairs prior to the competition.

Finalists will be announced by January 15, 2014. They should then contact the 2014 program chair, Jonathan Schildcrout, at jonathan.schildcrout@vanderbilt.edu and submit a topic-contributed abstract to JSM.